Landslide and flood in Nepal

Boulders sweep away homes

The unseasonal torrential rain in Nepal has brought flood chaos to Nepal’s southern plains. But in the hills to the north the rain has had a different impact with landslides being just as deadly. Houses have collapsed under a surge of boulders and mud and villagers have lost everything. In response, ChoraChori is concentrating its initial efforts on a village area in Makwanpur District, south Nepal.

Chipleti and Pratappur

The ChoraChori Operational Director Shailaja CM has gone with field worker Pratap Titung to visit Chipleti and Pratappur. These lie around 40km from the District town of Hetauda. They got there by a half hour motor bike ride followed by a two hour hike uphill.

Pratap Titung conducting a family assessment

Chipleti, which consisted of 127 households, is perched on a hillside that has been destroyed by a landslide. The ground is full of crevasses and very unstable. The only road access – a gravel track – has gone. So far only the police had been able to get to the village (briefly). Shailaja and Pratap found the villagers in a desperate state, getting by on a diet of maize. Just about all of the houses have been damaged. Everyone has accepted that there is an immediate need to relocate to lower ground and rebuild their village there.

Pratappur consists of 20 households. Homes have been swept away by both landslide and flood so people are now living in temporary shelters they’ve constructed and cooking in the open. The Red Cross has visited and given each family 10kg of rice, some lentils, beaten rice and tarpaulins. But this is not nearly enough. The villagers have been surviving on one meal a day to make the rations last. Meantime children are falling sick.

Emergency Relief

Shailaja (right) supervises the delivery of emergency supplies

Thanks to our Appeal we have been able to send £5,000 straight away for the purchase of food and essential supplies. However this is just half of what we need to provide one month’s worth of food security to the villagers while they rebuild their lives. We need to deliver 50kg of rice, 25kg of lentils, 10kg of beaten rice and 5kg of salt to each household. The cost of that is £10,345. Please help us overcome the impact of the landslide by donating below:

Floods wreak havoc in south Asia

Nepal devastated

Floods have swamped one third of Nepal following the worst monsoon rainfall in fifteen years. See the grim statistics in the image on the left. Now an estimated 5 million people have to manage as best they can after losing loved ones and homes to floods and landslides, their crops destroyed. You can’t fail to be moved by the harrowing pictures in this report of how a father unable to bury his child just released the child’s body into the flooded river.

A “one-door” policy

There was an added risk of this natural disaster being compounded by a manmade element when the Government of Nepal announced a “one-door” policy. This meant that all relief work would have to be channelled through a central body. This is fine in principle (to avoid inefficiency and duplication of effort) but the Government attempted this approach previously after the 2015 earthquakes and it failed badly. Such a strategy only delays essential emergency relief getting to the point of need due to red tape. Moreover it only serves to antagonise (or criminalise) those genuine individuals and NGOs that do respond with a sense of urgency. The legacy of a “one-door” policy is a long and painful one. Two years down the line an Asia Foundation survey has found that earthquake recovery work has been painfully slow.

Happily the Nepal Supreme Court has now instructed the Government not to implement this policy and relief supplies can now flow.

ChoraChori’s response

How can a small children’s charity like ChoraChori respond in a meaningful way to a disaster of this scale? First of all we can’t not respond given the scale of the crisis. And we have always prided ourselves in being a “can-do” charity. Whilst we can’t reach out to five million people we can certainly focus our efforts on village areas that we know well. These are communities in the south to whom we have returned children rescued from India. The ChoraChori-Nepal Operational Director, Shailaja CM, is currently making a needs assessment and this morning we transferred our first grant across to Nepal to begin to address the hardship she has identified.

The floods are now receding somewhat but the landscape has been lain waste and families left vulnerable with lack of shelter, food and water. There have already been reports of outbreaks of disease. We suspect that the worst is yet to come. Please help ChoraChori to deliver resources to the flood victims and desperate children before it’s too late using the button below.

A further report to follow.

Floods in Nepal August 20th, 2017Philip Holmes

CONTACT US!

If you would like to find out more or join our mailing list please get in touch